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Pediatrician Dr. Brian Thornburg has had several billionaires in his concierge practice over the years. “Not a single one of them has ever vaccinated their kids,” Thornburg told attorney Aaron Siri on “Informed with Aaron Siri.”
“Before they even walk into my office,” he said, these parents have already decided that the risks outweigh the benefits.
Thornburg administered vaccines for most of his 20 years in pediatrics. But his views changed after he began reading vaccine studies himself. He now argues that medical training teaches doctors to accept prevailing views rather than critically evaluate the evidence.
“I would say most doctors don’t know how to read a study,” Thornburg said.
He described a profession where students learn to repeat accepted answers, doctors rely on medical authorities to interpret research and studies that challenge conventional wisdom often go unexamined.
‘You just take what is being fed to you’
Thornburg said medical students are inundated with information and expected to absorb it quickly, then repeat it. Residency adds another layer of pressure: Students must defend their decisions in front of an entire department, often before they feel equipped to challenge established practices.
“You’re just looking not to get into more trouble, and answer what is expected to be the right answer,” he said.
When Thornburg asks medical students what they learned about vaccines, he keeps hearing the same answer.
“Every single student that I’ve interviewed … has stated basically, ‘We learned the schedule. We learned that vaccines are safe,’” he said. “There’s definitely a culture, a consensus attitude, that this is what we do to keep children healthy … and without it, kids would get really sick.”
Thornburg knows that culture firsthand. During residency, one of his favorite mentors told him that he wouldn’t accept families who didn’t vaccinate. Thornburg adopted that position, trusting his mentor and following what he had been taught.
“You just take what is being fed to you, and so I didn’t question vaccines,” he recalled. “Vaccines are safe, and they’re the cornerstone of health. And anybody who questions the safety of vaccines is a quack.”
Then families at the group practice where he worked began raising concerns about vaccines. Instead of dismissing them, Thornburg started investigating the scientific literature.
“There’s huge gaps,” he said of the studies he read. “There’s confounding issues. There’s bias. There’s some serious flaws.”
The research changed Thornburg’s own views.
“Instead of me converting them to believe that vaccines are safe, they converted me to become … an informed consent pediatrician,” he said.
Thornburg later started his own practice and began giving public lectures about vaccines. He said the response was immediate.
“I was filling up,” he said. “One hundred, 200 people in a room every time I gave a lecture because people were hungry for this information.”
What happens when nobody reads the studies?
Thornburg said many doctors rely on others to interpret research rather than examining the studies themselves.
“Where do most doctors get their information from?” he asked. “From the pharmaceutical rep that comes into your office. From your trade organization or your specialty organization, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, who synthesizes it and gives it to you.”
Pediatricians may see 45 children a day and be exhausted by the end of it. That leaves little time to dig into the research behind the recommendations they follow. “There isn’t a lot of time to investigate,” he added.
Thornburg and Siri argued that doctors who read and critically evaluate studies themselves might find that vaccines aren’t as safe and effective as they’ve been led to believe.
They cited several studies they said deserve closer scrutiny.
- A 2025 study in Annals of Internal Medicine examined aluminum exposure from childhood vaccines. Siri said researchers dismissed a group of more than 15,000 children who hadn’t received the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, rather than using them as a comparison group. The study also excluded a portion of the population based on an “implausible number of vaccines.” Siri called the study “a joke.” “Their definition of implausible included every kid in America,” he said.
- A 2023 study in Academic Pediatrics examined a possible link between aluminum exposure and asthma. Siri argued that researchers were trying to make a safety signal disappear. “They’re really, really trying hard to make that signal go away. Really hard. And they couldn’t,” he said.
- A 2004 study in Pediatrics examined MMR vaccination and autism. William Thompson, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scientist involved in the study, later said researchers removed data showing a connection between MMR vaccination and autism among some African-American boys. “It’s rampant, the level of corruption that’s happening,” Thornburg said.
The examples illustrate the questions Thornburg and Siri say doctors should ask when evaluating research: Which children were included or excluded? What groups did researchers compare? Could the study design actually answer the question being asked?
For Thornburg, the problem goes beyond any one study or doctor.
“We’re nice people. We take care of kids,” he said of pediatricians. “There’s just a lack of critical thinking in pediatrics.”
Siri: ‘You can have well-meaning people doing grossly negligent things’
Parents are entrusting pediatricians with the people they love most, so they naturally want to trust their children’s doctors, Thornburg said.
That trust can extend from an individual doctor to the organizations that shape medical practice.
“That translates into, ‘Well, then I trust the American Academy of Pediatrics,’ because … everything is built on this … blind trust,” he said.
Siri stressed that he doesn’t believe most doctors intend to harm anyone. But good intentions don’t guarantee good decisions.
“They’re not bad people,” he said. “They’re not trying to do bad. They genuinely believe they’re doing good, but they also have never really taken even the most basic steps to understand the basics about these products.”
Siri said his experience deposing medical experts reinforced his concerns about how little some doctors know about the products they administer.
“All the pediatricians I’ve deposed, I’ve never deposed one that’s actually even read a package insert,” he said.
He described one pediatrician with 40 years of experience who dismissed the presence of yeast in the hepatitis B vaccine as a conspiracy theory. Siri said he showed the doctor information on the CDC website listing yeast allergy as a precaution because yeast is an ingredient in the vaccine.
“You can have well-meaning people doing grossly negligent things. Those can coexist,” he added.
Thornburg said the internet is helping more doctors and parents investigate questions that once went largely unchallenged.
“Now more pediatricians are starting to wake up,” he said. “There’s just kind of like a wildfire … catching on. We’re seeing more and more doctors talk about this.”
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When fear takes over parenting
Thornburg also raised a question that goes beyond medical training: What happens when parents become so afraid of making the wrong decision that fear starts running their lives?
He said some parents who question vaccines worry about everyday activities — whether they can safely send their children to preschool, let them visit grandparents or take them to Disney World.
“I’ll tell families, if you are going to live in this perpetual state of anxiety … your head and your heart aren’t aligned,” he said.
Fear is already part of parenting, Thornburg said. Parents worry about letting babies cry themselves to sleep or introducing solid food because a child might choke. Vaccine decisions can become another source of anxiety, especially when parents feel pressured to accept one answer without room for questions.
“You can’t raise your child if you’re petrified that they’re going to die every time they walk outside of the house,” he added.
Thornburg said about half the families in his private practice don’t vaccinate their children. He advises parents to understand what they believe and why, rather than make decisions out of fear.
Siri echoed Thornburg’s emphasis on informed decision-making, noting that parents who decline vaccines shouldn’t be dismissed as uninformed.
“The highest proportion of folks who don’t vaccinate in America, who don’t vaccinate at all, are those who are extremely highly educated, often a Ph.D., often in the sciences, often very medical literate, scientifically literate,” he said.
For Thornburg, that message connects back to the problem he sees in medical education. Doctors shouldn’t simply repeat what they’re taught, and parents shouldn’t feel compelled to follow a decision they haven’t examined. Both need the freedom — and the tools — to ask questions, weigh evidence and think for themselves.
Watch Thornburg on ‘Informed With Aaron Siri’ here:
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- Watch: Is Your Unvaccinated Child Putting Others at Risk? ‘It’s Exactly Opposite,’ Pediatrician Says
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